Appearance:

Svetlana stands at about 5'7", with straight black hair that curls just under her ears. Her eyes are hazel, although she often wears blue contacts which add to an exotic look that made her popular among the men who employed her.

Her build is lean and taut-muscled, although she is not overly strong. She is a practiced athlete though and was quick and agile even before her Embrace; her vampiric abilities have only enhanced her flexibility and dexterity.

Her wardrobe is usually simple these days, consisting of jeans or, in more 'social' cases, leather pants, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket, usually with a pistol tucked under her arm (despite the fact that it is mostly ineffective against vampires, she still sees most of her threats as mortal). She also wears a pair of studs in her ears, varying between gold and silver. She usually wears hiking boots with her usual ensemble. She has a small cache of more formal clothes from when she played mob mistress, but only one or two of them survived her passage from Europe and she doesn't wear them much.

Svetlana has several distinguishing marks; the most obvious, of course, is the massive wound in her abdomen from the artillery shell. While it does not really bleed anymore, it will still stain clothes with smeared blood. Though she usually uses blood to repair her wounds, if she is trying to avoid feeding she will merely use bandages to cover it, although doing so still leaves her in a good deal of pain. She also has a small black rose tattooed on her left breast, and a few small scars from her days in Sarajevo on various parts of her body, although none are visible when she is dressed.

History:

*** ooc: The following is ooc info.

 Born in 1974, Svetlana was born in Sarajevo to a Russian diplomat and his Serbian wife. She was raised in the cloistered environment of the Soviet embassy and grew up with a somewhat strong faith in the Russian Orthodox church.

When the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989, her father fell out of favor with the leadership in Moscow (mostly because of the corruption and abuse of state funds that were uncovered) and he fled into the city with his wife. He soon became involved with the emerging Russian Mob through his old contacts in the crumbling Soviet Union and emerged as one of the more powerful kingpins in Yugoslavia.

Svetlana also began hanging around with members of her father's mob and got involved with some of their business (as well as some of the gangsters themselves), despite her father's unhappiness with her choice to do so.

Unfortunately, as Yugoslavia crumbled in 1992, her father was determined to stay and maintain control of his criminal empire even as Serbian troops began shelling the city. One night in April, while she was running an errand, an artillery shell impacted nearby, fatally wounding her.

Unknown to her, Svetlana had been under the watchful eye of a Toreador poet named Sergei Romanov (a distant member of the Russian Imperial family who was Embraced while fleeing Russian in the revolution of 1917). Seeing her fall, he quickly Embraced her (despite the large chest wound she had suffered), and took her to his Haven.

Unfortunately, the trauma of her Embrace and the fact that she woke up in extreme pain from her wounds made Svetlana disoriented and horrified at her transformation. She was angry at Sergei for condemning her to a life of constant pain and an unholy existence as one of the undead, and she wished only to leave and live and die with her family.

For two months, she was trapped in her Sire's Haven as he tried to get her to accept her new life. She learned to heal her wounds, only to discover with horror that they returned with each night, staining her sheets with her blood. Eventually, her Sire could keep her there no longer without killing her and she left, rejoining the remnants of her father's mob -- most of which had now died or fled, including her parents. Sergei continued to keep an eye on her as she moved through Europe, working for Russian organized crime, usually as a bodyguard and/or mistress to various mob figures.

Unfortunately, during the winter of 1999-2000, her current employer, a fairly high up member of the Berlin mob, was ambushed by a rival's men and the entire party was gunned down. Svetlana survived, and fled the scene, but decided it might be prudent to lie low for a while in case her employer's rivals decided to finish the job. She made her way through Europe and then across the pond to New York, finally reaching Dallas in early July. The Russian mob's influence does not extend into the area, and she thinks she will be safe there for the moment. 

Sergei lost her trail after the ambush in Berlin, and is still in Europe, although he hopes to eventually find her again and convince her to stop spending so much of her time among the mortals. During her journey westward, she has spent more time among her own kind, but she is still not comfortable with them, and her upbringing has given her the feeling
that her condition is a punishment from God (the brutal chest wound does not help matters).